"The Collapsium" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mccarthy Wil)

wasn't useful in and of itself; most collapsium structures weren't. But to get
to the shape you wanted, you had to pass through stable intermediate designs,
adding bricks one by one without upsetting the system's precarious equilibrium.
Often, this meant building complex shapes that "fell" into simpler ones when
completed, as a key and a lock might fuse to extrude a single, solid doorknob.
Or in this case, a kind of spacetime crowbar able to "pry" bits of vacuum apart
to see what lay beneath. Or so he hoped!
Before the assembly was half complete, though, an alarm bell chimed. This was a
sound he'd chosen carefully, one that penetrated, demanding attention. The
gravity wave alarm. Grunting, he thumbed a lighted yellow circle, increasing
magnification, leaning forward to scrutinize the display, to isolate the source
of the anomaly.
He didn't find it. Everything was right where it should be, his little Cerenkov
pinpoints all well within spatial and vibrational tolerances. The warning chimed
again, though, louder, the perturbation stronger, and Bruno cursed, because the
crowbar-to-be was in a very delicate stage right now, its collapsium lattice
supported by little more than good intentions. He grabbed the ends of the
structure, hoping to steady it, but through the desk's sensory pads he felt a
mild shudder, then another, stronger one. The warning chimed a third time, and
this perturbation had to be external, because soon his project was waving like a
seaweed, the collapsons growing uncertain as their holes' gravitic interactions
wandered in and out of phase.
"Excuse me, sir," the house announced through a softly lit speaker that appeared
in the wall. "A ship is approaching."
The collapsium slipped from his fingers and fell in on itself, an origami
structure folding and wrinkling into a spitwad of glowing dots.
"Blast," Bruno said. Then the dots winked out one by one, and a few seconds
later it was finished and gone.
"ETA, seven minutes," the house said, providing a flat schematic wallplate that
showed the spaceship's approach vector in relation to planet, sun, and moon.
Bruno sighed. The newer, much larger black hole he'd just created was difficult
to detect, lacking the clear emissions of a collapson, but he found it by feel,
charged it with a stream of protons and then, with a grunt of disgust, hurled it
off toward his other storage bin, the "wastebasket" hypermass orbiting his world
a thousand kilometers out. The trajectory was fine, nowhere near that of the
approaching ship. Maybe he should have arranged to graze them with it; a warning
shot, a demand for apology. But no, such horseplay could too easily go wrong,
else he wouldn't be stuck out here in the first place.
He sighed again, already trying to convince himself that seven days' lost labor
meant nothing, that he had plenty more timeЧinfinitely moreЧwhere that came
from. The dollar expenditure was actually harder to accept: two hundred neubles
down the drain, literally, along with the twenty he'd wasted last week, and the
eight last month, and the twenty more he'd thrownЧat one time or anotherЧinto
the wastebasket for this or that reason. The moon grew smaller, ever smaller, in
his sky, and while he certainly had the money to buy more substance for it, the
logistical difficulty of getting it delivered was daunting. His last shipment
had required the efforts of tens of thousands of people, whole corporations
commandeered for the purpose, and altogether the enterprise had cost even more
than the planet itself. Insanely selfish extravagancesЧthe leading vice of the
wealthy. But he couldn't postpone the next purchase forever.